{warning: long and a little personal at the end)
There's been some grumbling among Kossacks about the fact that Obama's new AG, Eric Holder, worked a number of years in a big corporate law firm.
Noweasels, a corporate lawyer him/her self who's applying for a job with the Obama administration, then posted one of the best accounts of a large-firm lawyer's life that I've ever read.
After that,
Timaeus launched a scathing response:
"But the balance is not in favor of the good. The balance at all of the big firms is in favor of evil. Lawyers who stay in that environment for an extended period are nearly all ethically compromised and corrupted, and I think that probably includes this earnest diarist."For that, Timaeus was barbecue-grilled: unlucky for him, Noweasels happens to be one of the most cogent and popular members of DKos. This criticism even extended to some Kossacks deriding his occupation and salary-- "I bet you can't help too many people making 30K a year as a Target associate". But even so, Timaeus continued to have his defenders-- and he continued to make some good points.
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Some of the points, however, that were lost on everybody, Timaeus included:
Remember how we excoriate Hank Paulson? How we say he puts Goldman Sachs first and the American economy second? Well, he's probably that way because he HAS to be.
They wouldn't allow him any kind of leadership position there unless he put Goldman Sachs front and center, before family, before country-- they'd say he "doesn't have the right attitude" or something.
Increasingly, companies are not even letting applicants
get a foot in the door unless they pass the personality test-- which can only mean that the American workplace as a whole has become "Goldman-Sachs-ified": company before family, before country, even before ethics. (Yes, even Target; as an aside to that Timaeus-heckler.)
People pounced all over Timaeus for sloppily making a point that is very painful and very true: yes, our workplace environments make us; in fact, they're the biggest shapers of our characters and personalities I know. (I'm even sloppier at making this point than he has been, so that's why I'm posting it here instead of there.) Employers are demanding harmony between the employee and their work environment to a degree I had never anticipated in my life, a degree that goes far beyond "getting along". Hank Paulson himself would probably not get a foot in the door at Goldman Sachs today, if during his interview he came across as insufficiently confident in Goldman's mission.
Many, many kudos to Noweasels for being an example of somebody who worked in corporate law and still kept their progressive values and compassion-- because, quite frankly, I tend to agree with Timaeus: most progressives believe that corporate law tends to weed out, especially with your bosses and co-workers serving as the personality and attitude police, most people with compassion for the little guy's justice. Just as the Wall Street environment weeded out anyone with compassion and long-term financial orientation.
In corporate law (which many of our poor law school grads HAVE to go into to pay off their student debts, because it's the most lucrative),
your job is to enable large corporations to justify their abuses and keep committing them. No wonder most progressives have a jaundiced view of them.
Which is why I appreciated Noweasel's thread all the more. Not only did s/he make the case eloquently that corporate lawyers are good people too, there's even the hope that maybe, just maybe, you CAN work in corporate law and STILL be a progressive-- which is what some young law school grads are dying to hear, seeing as how they have to work in a "corrupt" and "evil" environment just to
survive. (Just like some educated people, yes you heckler, have to work as Target associates to survive, and I can't
believe that you would make that kind of crack after all we've been through, and all the crazy-making and doubting of our own judgment we've suffered at the hands of those in power.)
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OK, here's where it gets personal-- and, in fact, a little bit about JK after all:
Gail Collins' crack about JK's sociability was painful, because
perceived lack of sociability is a career death sentence. There are a lot of fields closed to you if you have a reputation for being un-sociable... would JK even be elected to the Senate today? Not only that, the quality of the work of a person thought to lack social skills is frequently deemed inferior to the quality of work of a person thought socially adept. (Penelope Trunk said it a while ago in her column, and I can't find the link; she said "you can't make up for a lack of people skills" or something.)
I was considered socially awkward for much of my youth. All my adult life, I have been obsessed with proving I have good social skills. I've wondered if not playing sports in college, even though that was years ago, could put me at a disadvantage in the workplace today, because sports teams are a great place to learn social skills. Every activity I undertake that is solitary, feels less worthy to me because it's not with other people. I unproductively go over and over my past, what I did do and what I didn't do, and I see
everyone who has had a better, more exciting, more social past than me as competition-- someone who will get the good job while I won't.
Forget the Senate-- would JK even get into Yale today, if the admissions director was a Gail Collins type?
If the sociability focus has made me doubt my values, my character, and many of my everyday decisions, then how many others feel the same way?
Because while we snicker about them on this board, the fact is that, in our everyday lives, many of our employers are Gail Collinses, ready to make life-changing decisions for us because of their emotional whims. And for the most part, even progressives
just shut up and take it. We take it as given that employers can do whatever they want. We even empathize with employers' swift and brutal decision making.
The result: our distrust of corporations and institutions is deeper than you ever imagined. If they can treat something as important as the ability to earn a living so cavalierly--
and so confidently justify their actions-- then they are not to be trusted or believed, end of story. The degree to which one has to fit in with these environments, also makes whoever works for these companies, untrustworthy.
Corporate lawyers, therefore, epitomize the worst of both the everyman who has to fit into their workplace culture; and the spokesperson whose job is to say
only positive things about their organization, truth be damned. You know what happened in the Bush administration;
every government employee was expected to be a representative of their "company", just like in real life working real jobs. Anyone who deviated from their spokesperson role, in other words anyone who disagreed or told the truth, was rewarded with a pink slip! Again, just like in everyday life in real jobs.
Noweasels, of course, complicates everything.
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The point that everybody seemed to miss over there, was that our anxiety over Eric Holder and our antagonism toward certain employees is a direct result of the increasing requirement that you BE your job, even in your personal life; and that this requirement is, spiritually and emotionally, killing us. If there were more room for different personalities in different workplaces, if there wasn't so much pressure to have your personal attitudes and values be a certain way, we wouldn't be so much in arms over this.
We'd also be able to more objectively assess Holder's fitness for the AG job. (Personally, I love that he'll go after Bush admin abuses, but I'm worried about his stance on marjuana.)
I go by a different handle on DailyKos-- both to not put all my Internet eggs in one basket, and with the idea of starting my own blog someday. I have not posted a single diary under that handle, and the last comment I posted was months ago. I got good recommendation for what I wrote, but I would NOT be considered a credible enough source, lacking sufficient posting history, TU status and whatever markers mark one as a person who can be trusted. What I wrote here is even sloppier than Timaeus put it, so there's a better than average chance I would've gotten troll-rated or worse.
So... I'm here, and not there.